One of the recent trends I have noticed over a period of time is that many websites and web-based applications have started obsessing about their website performance and uptime. In order to understand this obsession better, I think we need to look at two key factors:
  1. Attention Span of the User
  2. Google Effect

Attention Span of the User

Many theories and scientific studies have been conducted on how data is being delivered to us via Internet and how it has changed the way we search and assimilate information. To put this in simpler terms, Google has made us think differently. Due to this powerful search engine, data is made easy to find and simpler to deliver.

As a result, readers have started losing patience when information is not readily available or readable. This in-ability of readers/users to hold attention in a specific website/application has started to drive the need for quicker and cleaner websites.

Website designers and developers not only design it to get the aesthetic part correctly, but also try to ensure that it loads quickly and smoothly as a result. Gone are the days when the user would have to wait for the entire website to load. In today’s high speed network world, if a website does not respond within 5 seconds, it is considered as slow and users lose interest.

This is even truer when your website is an e-commerce one. If your web application loads slowly, then users who use the service will be discouraged to return back to your website. This translates to lesser traffic to the website which in turn means lower revenue. To put it simply, if your website is slow, you are out-of-business.

A lot of new programming techniques are also being developed around to ensure to create high performance websites. These techniques enable the developer to easily customize the website to required specifications without affecting its performance.

Google Effect

Google had announced a while back about a change in its search algorithm which indicated that it will now take website loading times into consideration while calculating page rank. This new initiative by Google seems to have spurred web designers and web application developers even more into speed-obsessed frenzy.

Since their announcement, website developers and designers have started testing their website for optimal performance (translated as optimum loading time). This has given rise to the need for a tool which allows them to analyze website performance, understand each component impact on website performance.

Although there are several tools which allows users to that, we understand the inherent need for a comprehensive tool which would help the user to understand how website performance affects uptime. Our Web Page Analyzer tool allows web developers to check the performance of his/her website he/she is developing and find out if their websites are slow. It provides information such the loading time of individual objects (CSS, images, sprite image, JavaScript, etc), page size and the total loading time.

Web Page Analyzer
Results of Web Page Analyzer for a web application: ZOHO Writer

So, if you are designing a website/application and would like to find out how well your website performs, go ahead and use our tool. If you have any feedback, please feel free to use the comment section to post them. Also, if you think there are other factors which contribute to the need for fast loading, high performance websites, do let us know.
In a couple of previous blog posts , I showed you how to add multiple locations for a new website monitor.  The advantage of using multi-location is to get first-hand information on how well your website or web-based application performs in front of a worldwide audience. In this blog post, I shall demonstrate how to monitor your current website from multiple locations.

1. Log into Site24x7.

2. Select the website you wish add more locations or change those locations to a different one and click on 'Edit Details' link.



3. Under 'Secondary Location' option chose the locations you wish to monitor your website.

Select Secondary Locations
Select Secondary Location

4. Click on 'Update' button at the bottom of the page and then presto! - You have added new locations to your website monitor.

Now, if you go back to the particular monitor for which you added new locations, it will display updated global status of your website from those locations.

Updated Global Monitor Status
Updated Global Status

Availability and Response Time of Global LocationsAvailability and Response Time of Global Locations

You can further drill-down by clicking on each location response time. You can either email this report to yourself or download it in CSV format.

So, if you plan on monitoring your website from different locations, here's how you do it. Wanna try? Head to Site24x7 and start monitoring. If you do not have an account, it is pretty simple to sign up as well!
We are going to roll out a new user interface (UI) for Site24x7 shortly, which represents the first significant change to the interface since it was launched. We have made improvements to overall usability & accessibility and have updated colors and styles to match the Site24x7 website theme.

This update helps you to quickly access all features, data and statistics. It will be more intuitive, visual-friendly, easier to use and load faster.

A sneak-peek of the new interface can be seen below.
Website Monitor Detail Page

The new Site24x7 UI update will be rolled out to all Site24x7 users in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned.
When users search for a good website monitoring solution, one of the points in their checklist is whether the solution can monitor websites from multiple locations. This not only allows them to understand the availability and performance of their website, but also look at the end-user experience of their website from around the world. They enables them to fine tune the performance of their website based on availability and response time reports.

In this blog post, I will quickly run through the steps how to monitor a website and enable monitoring from multiple locations.

Adding multi-location monitoring for new websites :

Log into Site24x7 or if you do not have access, create an account now.

Click on 'New Monitor' pull-down menu, and select 'Website'.



Enter the label of the website, its address, whether you would like to associate this website with a monitor group. Select the frequency of the website you wish to monitor, the timeout, the default primary location.  You can set the polling interval as low as 1 minute to as high as 60 minutes or more.



Now select the secondary location. These secondary locations will allow you to monitor the website from multiple locations. For this example, I have chosen Sao Paulo, Sweden and Japan. Site24x7 allows you to easily alert you when your website goes down from one of the locations, configured.


Site24x7 also allows you to alert you in case there is a change in content or when the response time of the website increases. In addition, you can also add a host of alerting options such as keyword monitoring, regular expression match, website content modification and response time.


Once every thing is configured, simply click 'Add' and Site24x7 starts monitoring them.


As you can see, Site24x7 starts monitoring not only from its default primary location, but also starts monitoring the website from the multiple locations I have chosen from. So interested in trying out our multi-location feature for monitoring your website? Go ahead and give Site24x7 a try.